As you can see with this vote, elections do have consequences! Let’s not let them turn Pennsylvania into Wisconsin, no matter how many Koch-loving hacks we have in the state house: An attempt to pass a controversial amendment to a bill that would restrict union dues collection from state and school employees’ paychecks narrowly failed […]

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live. The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect: Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street. Imagine [...]

We tried to tell you. We told you not to screw us over during the 2008 primaries. We told you karma would get you for disenfranchising 18,000,000 of your own voters. We said it wasn’t a good idea to make fun of Tea Partiers even if you don’t like their positions. (for the record, we aren’t and we don’t) We begged you not to yield so much ground to the Republicans on healthcare reform, the stimulus package and the financial reform package. We told you it was the economy and jobs and burdensome fees and taxes and stagnant wages. You wouldn’t listen.

These next two years are going to be very painful for the rest of us. So do us all a favor and STFU about how the Clintons sold all of us working class liberals down the river. We don’t want to hear it.

There’s a remarkable piece in the Times this morning: Young Voters Say They Feel Abandoned. It’s about the enthusiasm gap heading into the mid-terms, which will likely see the formerly pro-Obama college crowd staying away from the polls in droves. The remarkable thing about the article is that the reporters cannot figure out why this might be happening. There is not a single reference to the Obama Administration’s stunning failure to deliver on its campaign promises (both implicit and explicit). Instead, the reporters chalk up the youngsters’ malaise to their feeling “left out” in some vague way. Probably just typical immaturity. Maybe if Obama had gone on The Daily Show more often, the kids would still be with him.

Oh, yeah, that’s it. If only he’d gone on The Daily Show more often.

The article is the soul-twin of another article that appeared in the Times 10 days ago: Democrats Try to Revive Female Voters’ Enthusiasm. The reporters (a different set, though obviously working from the same playbook) note that women seem to have lost their mojo for Obama and the Democratic Party. But the reason for this phenomenon is bafflingly mysterious. What could it be? Perhaps, the reporters say, it has something to do with the economy. Women seem depressed about the economy—yeah, that’s it!—and so they don’t feel like voting.

No wonder news reports suggest that Bill Clinton, not Barack Obama, is the most popular campaigner for Democrats in this election cycle. Embattled candidates who want the current president to stay away because they fear close association with his unpopular record welcome President Clinton with enthusiasm and gratitude.

But those candidates fail to acknowledge that the turning point that saved Clinton’s presidency came in November 1994, with the Republican sweep of the midterm elections.

Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America” GOP captured 53 Democratic House seats and eight Democratic seats in the Senate.

Almost immediately, Clinton reoriented his presidency toward a strategy of “triangulation”: positioning himself as the sensible centrist who stood midway between the aggressive conservatives who controlled Congress and his own stridently liberal Democratic allies on Capitol Hill. Abandoning the activism and sweeping goals that characterized the first two years of his presidency, Clinton rediscovered his identity as a New Democrat and governed successfully for the next six years as a pragmatic centrist.

I’ve said repeatedly that the mainstream media is a tool of corporatist propaganda. An oligarchy of big corporations and wealthy individuals own almost all of the newspapers, magazines and radio stations in this country. They own ALL the major television networks.

When the media isn’t busy trying to distract you with tabloid gossip they are running a scam designed to convince you that you are hearing both sides of the story.

On one side there is FOX News and all the other parts of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire presenting you with the conservative/Republican version of events. On the other side there is MSNBC and the New York Times presenting what is allegedly the progressive/Democrat version.

Both sides are lying to you.

The media will never “get it” because they don’t want to get it. They will say what their corporate masters tell them to say. The will do that because they want to keep their jobs.

Tomorrow and in the days that follow the right-wing media will solemnly declare that the Democrats lost because they were too liberal. Meanwhile the left-wing media will blame the Tea Partiers, the Chamber of Commerce, stupid voters and just about anything and everything except the failure of Obama and the Democrats to keep their promises to the voters.

The problem isn’t that Obama and the Democrats were too liberal. The problem is they weren’t liberal enough. And don’t buy that horseshit about “timid and weak” Democrats. They aren’t cowards and weaklings, they are corrupt crooks.

Give your Tea Party or just plain disgusted friend an earful before they step into that voting booth. If they don’t like Democrats, there are always other party candidates. If you are living in NJ, here is a list of all of the candidates running in your districts: Rutgers University’s 2010New Jersey Candidates and Referendum. As you can see, there are plenty of alternatives to Republicans and Democrats including the American Renaissance Movement, American Labor Party, Independents and Greens.

Whatever you do, don’t leave it up to someone else to determine the government you will have to live with for the next two years. No matter how much you hate the way politicians have used us, go down to the precinct, get your ticket, go into the voting booth and make the best decision you can. Sometimes, you have to stare at that row of buttons before you know what to do. Just do it. It’s that important.

Join us here at The Confluence for our Election Night 2010 Live-Blog starting at 8pm Eastern

Tell us in the comments what your voting strategy is. Here’s a recap of our voting strategies:

Elections have consequences…. Except perhaps when we vote on computers . (H/T Lambert)

Glenn Greenwald is attempting to unravel the mystery of last week’s bomb plot. It’s making my head spin but, Glenn’s sticking with it. He’s got three updates to his post now. And I’m sure there’s more to come:

Wait: I read in the NYT on Sunday that “evidence was mounting that the top leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, including the radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was behind the attempted attacks.” Today, however, in that very same paper, I learn that “American and Yemeni officials still have little hard evidence about who was involved in the thwarted attack” and “evidence is elusive.” How can evidence of the culprits simultaneously be “mounting” and “elusive”?

The reality, as today’s version of the NYT makes clear, is that the U.S. has no idea who is responsible for sending these bombs. So in the dark are they that Homeland Security actually blamed two Yemeni schools that don’t even seem to exist, with the only one remotely similar to it being one sponsored by the State Department.

From Naked Capitolism I’m reading about Title Insurance … I’ve been wondering about the poor people who’ve bought houses that were foreclosed under questionable circumstanes:

We’ve noted that title insurers have been refusing to eat the risk in foreclosure sales when they can’t verify the chain of title from local records. Of course, the idea that title insurance was ever really intended to be insurance in the first place is questionable: the title insurers only step up when they can verify that there appears to be absolutely no risk. A one-time client, a major NYC developer and Forbes 400 member, established a title insurer for his own residential deals because he saw the premium as free money.

Some have taken the route of writing qualified policies, but buyers appear to be waking up to that. So the industry response increasingly appears to be to have the bank selling the real estate indemnify the title insurer. Since the biggest servicers also happen to be the biggest banks in the US, this effectively means that the risk of clouded title in foreclosures is being absorbed by TBTF banks, and hence by taxpayers.

I could talk about polls and “change” but, why? The elections will be over soon enough. And we’ll all be here watching the returns when they do. Right?

Body: This paper, or pre-draft, or sketch, or whatever it is, started out with this title: "With The 12-Point Platform, this won't happen: An aristocracy of credentialism in the 20%." But then I realized I'd gotten in deeper than I thought -- one of those posts were the framework and the notes overwhelm the original idea -- and as it tur […]

This is a big bunch of catch-up, here, 'cause it's been a helluva few weeks. Gaius Publius interviewed Alan Grayson on Virtually Speaking, where Grayson discussed "how he 'cracked the nut' that allows him to get progressive legislation passed. Part of his secret - his goal is to be a person who 'gets things done for the progress […]